Michael Oatman
Study for The Birds, 2001, collage on paper, 14" x 20 1/2", Lent by the Artist
Pictures designed to explain the world fascinate me. Encyclopedia endpapers lumping together scientific devices and Earth's mysteries are wondrous diagrams; so too the epic paintings of Bosch and Brueghel. Those allegorical landscapes promote "restless looking" and at the same time reveal discreet narratives within continuous visual fields.
For ten years my art practice has been site-specific installations, or, as I call them, "Maximum Collages." My latest collages and videos are cosmologies on the order of those paintings I admire so much. I wanted to make pictures that would also reflect the complexities (time and scale) of my room-sized works.
I grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons, crazy landscapes where birds and rabbits ran amuck, dropping anvils on big-headed humans. The image that inspired these collages was also from childhood—a nineteenth-century German storybook entitled Struwwelpeter. In one story, a rabbit dons the glasses of a sleeping hunter, steals his blunderbuss, and staggers through town, shooting everyone he encounters. It is a tale of nature crossed with human lunacy, a world out of balance.
—Michael Oatman
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, June 15 at 3pm.
